Search results for "Stochastic frontier analysis"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Climate variability and agriculture in Italy: a stochastic frontier analysis at the regional level
2020
In the next future, climate change effects will represent a challenge for Europe and the Mediterranean area. These will have to cope with a rapid increase in climate variability. Although many economic sectors may be affected, agriculture is the most susceptible as climate heavily affects crop production trends, yield variability and the availability of areas suitable for cultivation. Using the stochastic frontier approach, the aim of this work is to analyse the impacts of climate variability on Italian regional technical efficiency in the agricultural sector for a period spanning from 2000 to 2009. Considering that technical inefficiency could be influenced by two main annual meteorologica…
Determinants and efficiency of Pakistan's chemical products' exports: An application of stochastic frontier gravity model.
2019
The estimation of efficiency of industry-specific exports is very important to find exports' gap and to frame exports promotion policy for targeted industry. This study attempts to investigate the main determinants of chemical products' exports of Pakistan with 62 trading partners by applying Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on an augmented gravity model for a period 1995-2015. The results corroborate that chemical products' exports follow gravity patterns. This study finds a negative and significant impact of import tariff on exports of chemical products while the positive impact of devaluation has been observed. Further, the estimations also take into account the impact of Preferential …
Technical efficiency and the vertical boundaries of the firm: theory and evidence
2013
This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between firms’ technical efficiency and the vertical organization of production. Technical inefficiency is explicitly introduced as the source of firms’ heterogeneity in a Bertrand–Nash model of industry competition: the main prediction of the model is that the most efficient firms choose vertical integrated structures and the less-efficient ones choose disintegrated structures. The empirical part of the article rests on a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) in a sample of about 400 Italian machine tool (MT) builders, and the result supports the prediction of the theoretical model.
Flexible Estimation of Heteroskedastic Stochastic Frontier Models via Two-step Iterative Nonlinear Least Squares
2019
Despite its importance, the monotonicity condition is typically overlooked in stochastic frontier analysis. This article illustrates a straightforward and useful method for the estimation of semiparametric stochastic frontier models imposing such constraint and incorporating exogenous inefficiency effects exploiting the scaling property. An iterative estimation algorithm based on nonlinear least squares is developed and the behavior of the proposed procedure is investigated through a set of Monte Carlo experiments comparing its finite sample properties with those of available alternatives. The simulation results highlight very good performance of the new algorithm which outperforms the comp…
Excessive Focus on Risk? Non-performing Loans and Efficiency of Microfinance Institutions
2021
Assessing the marginal cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: A parametric approach
2021
Abstract Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions involves effort from different sectors of the economy, including the water and sewerage industry. This study estimates the marginal cost of curtailing GHG emissions in the water and sewerage industry using stochastic frontier analysis techniques for a sample of ten English and Welsh water and sewerage companies over the 2010–2019 period. Results illustrated that the average marginal cost of reducing GHG emissions was 0.181 £/Kg CO2 equivalent. The marginal cost estimated notably differs across companies and over time. Findings further illustrate the impact of water companies' operating characteristics on the marginal cost of reducing carbon e…
Disentangling Tax Evasion from Inefficiency in Firms Tax Declaration: An Integrated Approach
2019
In this article we present a new methodology to support fiscal monitoring by the Italian Revenue Agency (IRA) with the aim of improving current taxpayers fiscal compliance and fighting tax evasion within small and medium enterprises. In fact, given the methodology behind the Sector Studies (Studi di Settore - SdS) system, there is room for firms to implement tax evasion strategies by simply adjusting revenues (and costs) toward an estimated average threshold (known ex-ante), the so called "presumptive" revenues, and achieving the fiscal "congruity" status. By estimating a production function through stochastic frontier analysis we avoid estimating the average threshold know ex-ante and can …
Drivers of productivity change: a comparison of English and Welsh water only and water and sewerage companies
2021
In regulated industries, such as the water industry, it is of great significance to estimate productivity change as it helps policy makers to evaluate the effectiveness of regulatory regime and ind...
Stochastic frontier models using R
2020
Abstract The production function is usually assumed to specify the maximum output obtainable, from a given set of inputs, describing the boundary or frontier of the obtainable output from each feasible combination of input; it relates the production process of individual units to the efficient border of the production possibilities. The measure of the distance of each unit from the border is the most immediate way to assess its (in)efficiency. However, the production function is not generally known, but it has only a set of information on each production unit and it is therefore essential to develop techniques to estimate the production frontier. Starting from the packages already developed…
Innovation efficiency: a bibliometric review and future research agenda
2021
Innovation efficiency has become a phenomenon of global interest. This paper reviews 165 articles from academic journals of innovation efficiency, applies the data-driven text mining approach to ma...